


Human Resources

by smilebackwards



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s01e04 Cyberwoman, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-23
Updated: 2009-05-23
Packaged: 2017-11-02 20:22:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto was hired to Torchwood for his intuition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Human Resources

**Author's Note:**

> Because what I really need to be doing is _not_ studying for exams, and what this fandom really needs is another _Cyberwoman_ tag (sort of).

When Ianto works at Torchwood London, he is part of the Department of Human Resources.

It sounds like an ordinary title for an ordinary division, but really it’s a bit of a joke. It is their job to wipe and replace memories, to maintain the secrecy of Torchwood. They aid in the _department_ of human resources, whether it is Torchwood personnel or overly-curious bystanders.

They are an unusual group of people, collected from unusual places, in unusual ways. Brian had been a computer hacker. Martin, a librarian with a talent for digital imaging.

Ianto was working in a coffee shop.

He was chatting amicably with one of the customers, a student from the nearby university, and making her a mochasippi despite the fact that she’d ordered a frappuccino. When it was finished, he handed it over the counter.

She took a sip and let her eyes slide closed in pleasure. “This is not my frappuccino,” she sighed. “I don’t know what it is, but I want you to make it for me every day for the rest of my life.”

Ianto smiled. “I know you better than you know yourself,” he teased.

She laughed brightly. “You probably do,” she said, taking her coffee over to a table by the window and propping open her laptop.

The man in line behind her gave Ianto a rather assessing look and ordered a cappuccino. Ianto added a dollop of cream and extra foam without being asked.

Two hours later, when Ianto was closing the shop and encouraging lingering customers out the door, the man was still sitting at the table in the far corner. Ianto came over to him. “Would you like an espresso corretto for the road, sir?” he asked politely.

“Would you like a job?” the man replied.

-

Ianto loves his job at Torchwood.

He finds the required skill set of the department fascinating. Everyone is detail-oriented, creative, cautious, subtle and intuitive. Most of them have experience with psychology and pass psychic training with discreet ease. Ianto knows that at least two of his co-workers can see through perception filters.

It’s the first place he’s ever found where he feels like he belongs.

-

On a late night in early May, a young woman named Marie Susanna Everett is attacked by a Weevil. It gouges shallow claw marks into her left arm and deeper marks into her peace of mind before the Torchwood retrieval team arrives to take it into custody.

Ianto hands her a cup of strong coffee, which she clutches with shaking hands, eyes averted, and takes the memory away.

It’s like rewinding the clock. Like guiding someone to turn left when they would have turned right. Sometimes Ianto feels like he is creating parallel universes.

-

The first time Ianto meets Lisa is by the coffee machine at 9:00 on a Monday morning. She is drinking from a white Styrofoam cup and savoring the liquid like it is ambrosia.

“I’m going to find whoever made this coffee and marry them,” she says.

“That would be me,” Ianto replies, then wonders if maybe he should have just kept his mouth shut about that.

Lisa looks him up and down, mischief in her clear brown eyes. “All right,” she says with a smile.

-

The Department of Human Resources tends to keep capricious working hours.

Sometimes there will be a massive alien incident which requires all hands on deck for the elaborate cover up. They’ll work forty hours straight, breaking only for coffee.

Other days, Torchwood personnel will remember that the organization is supposed to be a _secret,_ and no retcon will be necessary.

During these lulls, Ianto is often loaned out to Archives. He was hired for his intuition (and maybe a little for his coffee-making, Stephen admits), but it has also been discovered that he has fantastic skills of organization and recall.

Ianto likes the archives. They are tidy and cool, and no one minds that he finds the documentation riveting. He spends a great many hours learning about amazing devices that are simply stored away in vacuum-sealed boxes and forgotten.

Ianto doesn’t forget about them. This will serve him well later in life.

-

The best two years of Ianto’s life end in blood and fire and metal. They end in Lisa half-dead and helpless, chained to a torture rack.

Twenty seven people from Torchwood survive the Battle of Canary Wharf, and Ianto is one of them.

So is David Mason, Vice President of Engineering and Biotechnology. Of those who are left, Mason holds the highest rank. While the other twenty five are scavenging the ruins or sobbing or staring into space, Mason pulls Ianto aside.

“This is what we are going to do,” he says.

-

Ianto envisions twenty six new lives.

He makes them happy.

Sarah is young enough to be in university. He puts her on a course of business and information studies at Oxford.

Alan and Erin he keeps together. They were friends, and Ianto sets them up as lovers. He always thought them compatible.

Alex will be a mechanical engineer.

Robert will be a physicist.

He tries to give them all good lives, suited to their talents and interests. He wants them to be happy. Everyone calls them The Survivors, and Ianto wants them to survive.

But retcon is not a perfect solution. Memories can be triggered and sometimes emotions don’t entirely fade even when people can’t remember exactly what caused them. Canary Wharf isn't the type of thing that can be glossed over and expected to remain forever dormant, and painful emotions with no discernable cause can lead to suicides. People need some sort of rationalization.

So Ianto makes their lives happy, but he gives them each a tragedy, something they can cry about in the middle of the night and feel they have reason to.

Meghan’s best friend–-Allison who always smiled, who died at Canary Wharf, her body scarred and burned from the ravaging fires–-dies in a car crash.

William’s fiancée-–Lily from Accounting, sliced apart by the metal conversion units–-dies of complications from a routine surgery.

Ianto tries to keep a kind of symmetry.

He tries to give them gentler deaths.

-

Five bottles of retcon are scavenged from the ruins of the tower. Three of the bottles contain the One Lost Day pills. The other two hold the more potent liquid version. 150 milliliters in all.

 _Plenty,_ Ianto thinks.

-

It takes Ianto the best part of a month to arrange twenty six new lives. He tries to create one a day.

They give him diaries and hard drives, pictures and birthday cards. He collects six coffee mugs with the Torchwood logo, thirty five pens and seventeen secure-access keycards. (He uses David’s surrendered keycard to get the equipment he needs to rebuild Lisa’s conversion unit/life support system.)

Anyone who lives within ten miles of Canary Wharf, Ianto moves to a new city.

Everyone takes their allotted dosage-–1 milliliter for every year at Torchwood–-without complaint, a kind of shocked relief in their eyes.

Most of them thank him.

-

Trish is the last. She is the only one of Ianto’s friends that survived with him. He knows the others from passing in the halls, chatting at the office Christmas party or just digging through their personnel files, but Trish is his friend.

They’ve gone on picnics and road trips, been to films and carnivals. She likes double fudge ice cream and always sent him silly e-mails full of the latest office gossip (mostly made up). He remembers her laughing with Lisa over the night he got spectacularly drunk and they’d persuaded him to sing karaoke.

Ianto doesn’t want to let go of her, but he knows it’s the kindest thing he can do.

Before he gives her the retcon, Trish hands Ianto a picture. He and Lisa smile out of it, sandwiched in by Trish and Eric. “I was going to let you keep this one,” Ianto says unsteadily. “Let you remember us as old friends from university.”

Trish’s smile is as watery as her eyes. “We look too happy,” she explains. “I’d wonder why we lost touch. I’d try to find you.”

Ianto kisses her forehead and tells her to roll up her sleeve.

When her eyes slide closed, Ianto feels like he is the last survivor of Canary Wharf.

-

After everyone else is squared away, Ianto creates one more fabricated new life; for himself.

He tries to remember his life as of two years ago: a dead-end job in a coffee shop, drifting. He doesn’t think he could go back to that. Instead, he makes himself a software engineer who writes fiction in his spare time.

He keeps his pictures of Lisa, but writes her out of his life as an extremely messy break up, the kind of thing you shouldn’t think too hard about.

He moves back to Cardiff to start over.

It’s the life an ordinary person might have, and Ianto thinks he could make something of it. He could roll the dice and end up happy.

There is a vial with 5 milliliters of leftover retcon in the medicine cabinet of his flat–-his and Lisa’s flat. He doesn’t use it. _Can’t_ use it. But Lisa is getting worse, not better, and in the back of his mind Ianto thinks, _maybe someday._

-

Ianto sets aside his fallback life of ignorant, retconned bliss and makes a new life without erasing the memories of the old.

Torchwood Three is hard to get into, but easy to disappear in.

Jack wants to fuck him. Everyone else just wants more coffee and less paperwork. He is surprised at how effortless it is to slip through the cracks.

Sometimes Ianto is so good at going unnoticed he feels like he’s walking around with a perception filter on. He is a half-seen ghost, only there if someone is looking, and no one ever is.

-

Lisa is hardly responding to the pain medication anymore and Ianto feels like he’s clinging to the edge of a precipice. He wonders what Jack would do if Ianto told him about Lisa, and the resulting mental image of Lisa with a bullet hole between her eyes makes him want to scream.

When Dr. Tanizaki agrees to come examine Lisa, it feels like the first bit of hope Ianto has had in months.

 _Hold on,_ Ianto thinks, to Lisa, to himself, his fingers scrabbling at an eroding edge. _Hold on._

But Ianto was hired to Torchwood for his intuition, and somehow he knows he’s going to drop.

 


End file.
